Waxing power, waning pollution: The effect of COVID-19 on Russian environmental policymaking.

Like most countries globally, COVID-19 continues to have a demonstrable health, economic, and environmental impact on Russia. The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible ramifications for environmental quality in Russia during and following the coronavirus pandemic. Our work builds on the framework of Elinor Ostrom, as we argue that the pandemic and subsequent lockdown in Russia has highlighted the need for a more polycentric, de-centralized approach to environmental protection.

A Confirmation Bias View on Social Media Induced Polarisation During Covid-19.

Social media has played a pivotal role in polarising views on politics, climate change, and more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. Social media induced polarisation (SMIP) poses serious challenges to society as it could enable 'digital wildfires' that can wreak havoc worldwide. While the effects of SMIP have been extensively studied, there is limited understanding of the interplay between two key components of this phenomenon: confirmation bias (reinforcing one's attitudes and beliefs) and echo chambers (i.

Rare earth and financial markets: Dynamics of return and volatility connectedness around the COVID-19 outbreak.

This study examines the return and volatility connectedness between the rare earth stock market and clean energy markets, world equity, base metals, gold, and crude oil. Using daily data from September 21, 2010 to August 28, 2020, a time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) approach to connectedness is applied to uncover the dynamics of connectedness during the entire period and the COVID-19 pandemic period. Volatility connectedness is generally stronger than return connectedness.

Where is my home?: Gendered precarity and the experience of COVID-19 among women migrant workers from Delhi and National Capital Region, India.

With growing interest in the lives of individuals and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is consensus among scholars, academicians, and policy makers that the pandemic has had unequal impacts on different sections of the society. The dominant idea that "we are in this together" needs to be critically unpacked to understand the differential impact of the same pandemic on people with varied vulnerabilities. The concept of "intersectional vulnerability" has been key to understanding the unequal distribution of the pandemic risk.

An analysis of COVID-19 clusters in India : Two case studies on Nizamuddin and Dharavi.

Background: In this study we cluster the districts of India in terms of the spread of COVID-19 and related variables such as population density and the number of specialty hospitals. Simulation using a compartment model is used to provide insight into differences in response to public health interventions. Two case studies of interest from Nizamuddin and Dharavi provide contrasting pictures of the success in curbing spread.

Portfolio frontier analysis: Applying mean-variance analysis to health technology assessment for health systems under pressure.

The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging how healthcare technologies are evaluated, as new, more dynamic methods are required to test the cost effectiveness of alternative interventions during use rather than before initial adoption. Currently, health technology assessment (HTA) tends to be static and a priori: alternatives are compared before launch, and little evaluation occurs after implementation. We suggest a method that builds upon the current pre-launch HTA procedures by conceptualizing a mean-variance approach to the continuous evaluation of attainable portfolios of interventions in health systems.

Your reviews or mine? Exploring the determinants of "perceived helpfulness" of online reviews: a cross-cultural study.

Unlabelled: E-commerce platforms allow customers to post online reviews about their products, but many of these reviews remain non-voted by existing customers. Current literature on the of online reviews has overlooked the effect of these non-voted reviews. Additionally, current studies lack the cross-cultural perspective to help analyze the influence of cultural factors during an analysis of online reviews in an e-commerce platform.

Wearable Technology Acceptance in Health Care Based on National Culture Differences: Cross-Country Analysis Between Chinese and Swiss Consumers.

Background: The advancement of wearable devices and growing demand of consumers to monitor their own health have influenced the medical industry. Health care providers, insurers, and global technology companies intend to develop more wearable devices incorporating medical technology and to target consumers worldwide. However, acceptance of these devices varies considerably among consumers of different cultural backgrounds.

Quality management in humanitarian operations and disaster relief management: a review and future research directions.

Quality management has been widely discussed in the literature, and recent special issues on humanitarian supply chains and relief operations have emphasized the increasing importance of quality management in this key emerging area. In this paper, we provide an extensive literature review in the field of quality management in humanitarian operations and disaster relief management. Our comprehensive review, comprising 61 articles published from 2009 to 2018, leads to the identification of enablers (e.

A novel hybrid approach to forecast crude oil futures using intraday data.

Prediction of oil prices is an implausible task due to the multifaceted nature of oil markets. This study presents two novel hybrid models to forecast WTI and Brent crude oil prices using combinations of machine learning and nature inspired algorithms. The first approach, MARSplines-IPSO-BPNN, Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARSPlines) find the important variables that affect crude oil prices.

Determinants of supply chain coordination of milk and dairy industries in Ethiopia: a case of Addis Ababa and its surroundings.

Coordination of different business activities among units becomes vital as organizations pay much attention to their core activities. Thus, their fruitfulness constantly relies on their capacity to coordinate their internal and external activities in the supply chain outside their own boundaries. Giving consideration to these obvious reasons, this paper aims to investigate the determinants of supply chain coordination of milk and dairy industries.